Silly Little Girl

Finally.

There are a lot of kinds of abject happiness. There's the joy you feel when your child amazes you. The peace and fuzziness that comes when your partner reminds you for the millionth time why you chose them. There's the feeling of a job well done at work, an accomplishment you've been working toward for years, the acquisition of a long-awaited treat.

And then there's one that most avid sports fans feel at least every couple years. The ecstasy of winning a world championship. Except here, in my city, in Philadelphia, I've never felt that. In fact, most of my peers have never felt that. It's been 25 years since ANYONE in this city has ever felt that. Every couple years, each of our teams lead us on and get our hopes up, and like the insane people we are, we begin to believe again. But it seems to be the curse of this city that we're destined to have our hearts broken. Even as we hope, we usually see it coming, but that doesn't stop it from hurting any less.

Our baseball team, especially, is a source of heartache. We're the losingest franchise in sports history.

So on Sunday of this week, when we took a 3-1 lead over the Rays, and ESPN and Comcast Sportsnet kept leading with stories titled "One Win Away", it was almost hard to get too excited. It was painful to hope. It's like there's this buzzing in the back of your head, deep in your chest, this dull whir of excitement, but the more practical, sensible part of you is muffling it.

Even on Monday night, when we took a 2-1 lead, I felt myself choking down my animation. And when the game got called - for sleeting rain in the middle of October, rain that was followed by a snowstorm the next day - part of me thought, "Well. That's it. That's just Philly, you know? We'll blow the rest of this game when it resumes, and then we'll go back to Tampa, where their pitchers might end up better than ours."

But then, last night, something happened. We started strong. We stayed strong. We took the lead and they tied us, and then we took it back again. And when Brad Lidge, arguable one of the best closers in the league, came out to finish what could be the last half inning, and they started running taglines like "perfection" I wanted to scream. 'NO. DO NOT CALL HIM PERFECT. DO NOT CALL ANYTHING PERFECT. DON'T YOU KNOW PHILADELPHIA CAN'T EVER BE PERFECT!?"

And then...and please believe me when I tell you that I can't write this without crying...it was perfect. One night, one day, one game, Philadelphia was perfect. And we were the best. And our players streamed the field and tackled each other, fans sobbed in the stands, in bars across the city, at the intersection of Frankford and Cottman. Strangers hugged and kissed each other. Fireworks went off in every suburb of the city. My neighbors clanged pots and pans all up and down the street. Drivers blew their horns all through the neighborhood. My husband danced and screamed, and then sobbed with me. Phones all across my tiny apartment complex rang off the hook all night.

And it was perfect. Finally.

When it all becomes real.

My son started kindergarten the first week of October.

He was late for a two-fold reason. Back in February, when his dad and I still split custody 60/40, with Donovan there Sunday night through Wednesday evening, and the rest of the week with me, he started having problems in the pre-school he attended while at his father's. Apparently the behavior had begun the previous fall, and only got worse as the year progressed. By the time I got wind of it from his father's girlfriend, the school was requesting a meeting with his father to discuss their options. It was decided at this meeting that Donovan could no longer attend the school. They were small, and did not have the resources to deal with a kid who, for whatever reasons, lacked the desire or ability to listen or socialize, a kid who acted out with extreme anger at any perceived inconvenience to him.

This was, in some ways, I think one of the best things that happened to our family. Because their options for daytime childcare were now limited, and with the knowledge that kindergarten loomed in the fall (which we had always agreed he would attend in my school district, living full-time with me) his father agreed to rearrange the custody arrangement much sooner than intended. My son came home.

It was certainly a transition. He missed his dad and his family. But within a month, his behavior improved a thousand times over. He was no longer surly and defiant. Well. He was, but not in an unusual way. He was head-strong in the way that most 4 year old kids are. Out of respect for Donovan's privacy, and that of his father's, I won't detail too intensely why I think this is, but suffice it to say, I had a different kid on my hands.

But still, he seemed to have a lot of difficulty in social environments. He took it extremely personally when kids didn't want to play with them, but in turn would not LET them play with him unless they followed his very specific and detailed plan of action. He became frustrated and overwhelmed easily, shutting down when asked to do something that did not come naturally to him. In April, I registered him for kindergarten. When it became apparent that he still became almost completely non-functional in larger groups of kids, and after a lot of deliberation, I withdrew his registration in June. I figured we'd wait a year. Keep him in a smaller, home-based pre-school, and transition him into a larger summer camp type environment next summer. He'd start kindergarten when he was six, and hopefully he would have matured and adjusted enough to deal with it.

Around August, he started showing signs of progress. Both socially and academically. Once terrified by too many kids, he could run into a large birthday party and immediately make friends. Once completely averted to books and letters and numbers, he could now sit for hours making me help him figure out how to spell "house" or "The Fifth Element." (He saw it once and became utterly obsessed with it.) He wanted to learn to add, he wanted to practice counting to infinity. Nik and I began to wonder if we made a mistake holding him back. And right around then, right before the school year was due to start, we got the letter that the teaching faculty of his district had struck.

The strike lasted a month. By the time it was over, Nik and I decided that we'd attempt what we'd been told would not be possible - we would try to enroll him for this year.

When I called the district, school had been in session for about 4 days. I fully expected to be turned down. When I withdrew his registration in the summer, I was told that I could not change my mind. But to my surprise, they could not have been more helpful and accommodating. He began three days later.

And where I expected tears - at a big school with hundreds of kids, at his first ride on the school bus - where I expected fear and trepidation and a rough transition for everyone, I found only enthusiasm and joy, and a kid with a sunnier disposition than I've seen in a long time.

He comes home every day and regales me with his day. I make him talk about the things I really want to know - the lessons he learned, what he drew, what instruments he tried to play. He then tells me the things he really wants me to hear - who played Play-Dough with him, which song they sang and the dance moves that go with it. Where I expected difficulty, there was none. But likewise, where I expected ease, there was none there, either.

I expected it to be easy for ME. I expected to maybe shed a tear as I watched him embark to his classroom the first time, and then I assumed it would be me assuaging fears and concerns. It didn't occur to me that it would be me racked with fear now.

He comes home, and he's still my little guy. He's still ungodly annoying, he still shadows most of my steps in a desire to stay close to me. But now, there's 3 hours a day, (and that seems like so much for such a little dude) where he's standing on his own. 3 hours a day where I can't protect him. 3 hours that become longer every day that he's truly his own little person, and not an extension of me any longer.

And I worry. I can monitor and discuss what he's learning from the books, from the teacher, from the lessons. But what's he learning about life? Is he learning that not everyone is always nice? Is he learning that there are more hurts in the world than the kind you can cover with a band-aid?

I worry about his feelings getting hurt. I worry that the boys will realize that he'd rather play with girls and dolls than trucks and dirt and tear into him. I understand now why my peer's parents had been so controlling over their appearances and behaviors (my mom wasn't controlling over anything, including herself). There is a part of me that wants to change who he is to protect him. I am doing well so far at keeping that part of me silent, but it's still there.

And then my worries become more far-reaching, sometimes macabre. I worry about his safety. I worry about when he's older and the kids are more vicious - when bullying turns to violence. I am still young enough to vividly remember the high school hierarchy. I remember believing that if you didn't want to be a victim, you had to be a perpetrator. I wonder how to teach my son to be neither, to be the strongest of his classmates in his ability to be both an unavailable target and a champion of the underdog. I worry that if the worst happens, it won't matter.

Those who went before you tell you over and over to grasp those dependent moments of your children and hold them tight forever, because they will slip away from you before you know it. And you believe them, a little. But it still shocks you to your core when you realize there is a part of your baby that you can't hold forever. There truly are times when you cannot protect them. That it would not be in their best interests to try.

Those of you with ADD, this post is for you.

I have to throw this right out there - this post is going to be ALL over the place.

I pretty much stopped writing because I came down with some type of flighty, temporary case of massive ADD. Every time I'd sit down to compose a post in my head, something would change. The world, the election, the economy, my job, my life, my pregnancy - and a new post would start to form around that. Over the last six or seven weeks, that's made for about 25 different, partially formed ideas.

But it bothers me when I don't write. I've been writing in some form since I was about 12, and going for long periods without doing so (I refuse to count the bullshit legal writing I do at work, because drafting a letter to a judge and a bank about why they should let me take money out of someone's account doesn't really do it for me. A lot of it may be fiction, but it still fucking sucks) always makes me a little jittery. I find my thought process is more organized when I'm writing things down. Random as they may seem to you, it makes a kind of a sense to me, and it helps me keep my shit together. So consider this entry kind of a purge of all the bullshit floundering inside my skull, so maybe I can start clean and get myself back on track.

To pretend that this post has any kind of coherence, I'm going to number the plethora of random ideas in my skull. Lists are organized, yo. Lists make you look smart.

1. John McCain. Although it's been said so much better and more eloquently than I could ever phrase it both here and  here, I'm going to try to tackle it myself, too.

I'm going to leave the air quotes around the word "health" to the professionals. Anyone with a modicum of intellect and compassion sees the blatant dismissiveness and condescension toward women in that statement. If you don't agree, go read a foxnews.com blog or something. I shouldn't have to tell you that that right there? That "health" issue? Is fucking bullshit.

What kills me, and I know this seems like small potatoes in the big scheme of the issue, is the propaganda surrounding the entire argument. Specifically, the term "pro-life."

Yo. Listen. You're not pro-life, ok? You're anti-choice. "Pro-life" is a right-wing Christian term designed to install fear and intolerance. When we're talking about issues, we have to assume that each faction has its opposite. Logically, the opposite of the term "pro-life" would be "anti-life." Jesus. NO ONE is anti-life. It's not like there's all these crazy fucking liberal hippies running around with banners and signs screaming 'CHOOSE DEATH. WE HATE LIFE. WE HATE THAT YOU'RE ALIVE, THAT WE'RE ALIVE, THAT ANYONE WAS EVER ALIVE EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE. WE'D ALL BE BETTER OFF IF THERE WAS NO LIFE." It kills me that deliberate political misinformation and propaganda is par for the course, and that so many people still buy into it.

I watched the debate on CNN. If you did, too, you know that they run a live, real time response meter of Ohio undecided voters. Nik noticed that during McCain's rant, the approval rating of women raised higher than the men's. Nik wondered aloud why that was, assuming that women would be more intolerant of the possibility of their choice being taken from them. I told him that I knew exactly why that is. We didn't discuss it further, but I thought about it for a long time afterward, and had we continued to muse on it, this is what I would have told him.

Any woman who has ever been pregnant or attempted to get pregnant with the intention of maintaining the pregnancy knows that at its best, the act of growing and carrying a child is nothing short of miraculous. The reality is that men will never fully understand exactly what it's like, so on some levels, the issue of choice is less personal. So I understand that for a woman who has never faced the horrifying situation of choosing between the mortality of your children or yourself, it can be just short of incomprehensible to willingly terminate a pregnancy. I cannot hold this against any woman. I understand.

What I do NOT understand, however, is using that as a sole basis of supporting the efforts to ban women from choosing what to do with their bodies. In my opinion, one of the biggest flaws of this culture, or possibly of human nature in its entirety, is the notion that we can know with certainty exactly what we'd do in a certain situation. How can you, having never faced an unplanned pregnancy or a decision regarding your ability to CONTINUE LIVING, and know exactly what you'd do? You can't. Scary as the unknown may be, you have to own up to the reality that you will never truly know every aspect of yourself. Unless you encounter every possible experience that life has to offer, you will never know exactly how you will think, feel and act in the face of all of those experiences. Believing that you can or do is a surefire invitation for life to fucking punch you in the face.

As far as politics goes, that is all for now.

2. My life. My life has gotten exponentially better since my wedding, for a number of reasons that it would bore you to detail here. There are still some roadblocks, though. After a series of financial missteps, Nik and I keep being forced to face the reality of one huge issue - we're having a really hard time changing our lifestyle.

Our attitudes are ones of good intentions but poor follow through. We plan to save money, but in one suggesting of an outing for dinner, that goes out the window. We plan to keep our house cleaner, but each day there's a reason to put off taking the trash out to the next. We plan and plan and plan but never follow through. And while we grow increasingly sick of it, we seem to be at a stalemate.

It's funny. We come from such incredibly different backgrounds. I was raised by a woman who, through her own actions AND by what she preached, taught me that I rarely have to take responsibility for my own actions. I was taught to tell myself that the consequences of my decisions are so far down the road there's no point in worrying about them now. I'm lucky, though. At 22, I recognize this, and I try to make a conscious decision to do the OPPOSITE of every my mom did. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I'm trying. At 51, my mom is still living this lifestyle, and believe me, she's got all the inglorious trappings to show for it.

Nik, however, was raised by two parents who are the picture of hard work and responsibility. They were born from little more than what my mom was, but where she gave up, they pushed harder. Nik was taught to never procrastinate, never act without thinking, never assume your actions won't have consequences. Always clean up your own mess, always think of the future.

And yet, here we are. Two adults who procrastinate, act without thinking, and believe that maybe, just maybe, this time, our missteps and poor choices won't catch up with us.

I'm sure we're not the only ones. I'm positive that there are many that were in the same position as us, (what we're mainly dealing with is fiscal and domestic irresponsibility - a bad checking account and a filthy house) so I'd love to hear what you did to change your ways. Small and large steps you took to correct your behavior. I'm all for the whole "fake it till you make it" kind of thing. I just need a little push to figure out where the hell to start. Any tips?

*****

This is really just the tip of mental iceberg I've got going on, but I've already spent more time writing this than I should have (I swore to Christ when I got home that I'd take advantage of the babysitter I have this afternoon to get some cleaning done...HELP ME) so I've got to call it quits here. Feel free to chime in with your own rants about the debate and I seriously would really like to hear your suggestions on growing the hell up, already.

Denis Leary shouldn't make you cry.

I have about a half dozen almost finished posts just waiting for their final touches. Various musings and meanderings about the election, the economy, the general state of the union, and also about the state of my own little union. There's been a lot of twists and turns of events around here, some fantastically good, some a little bad, some turning out to be nothing at all. From our resident five year old starting kindergarten (jesus christ where did the last five years go?) to various trips to Labor & Delivery for the gamut of unexplaining spotting to regular contractions, it's been a busy month. Eventually I'll finish these entries.

But now, I just wanted to take a second to say that although I've been a Denis Leary fan for quite some time (since my mother fell head-over-heels, frighteningly, stalkerishly, obsessively in love with him back in The Ref days) I never quite expected to be moved to tears in one of his shows or films. (That being said, I've never watched Rescue Me, which I'm told is sometimes an extremely depressing show.) However, I just watched Recount. (Made for HBO, also starring Kevin Spacey, about the 2000 presidential election. I highly recommend it.)

I fact-checked while I watch, the movie was pretty historically accurate. And I cried. A lot. I cried thinking about the absolute breakdown in the judicial system, I cried thinking about the people in Florida who felt their voices were not heard, and of course, mostly, I cried for what could have, SHOULD HAVE, been. 8 years that wouldn't have happened. Eight years that I could have gone differently. How, I believe, that we'd now be a country that didn't know the horror of terrorism on our own soil, in our nation's unofficial financial capital. How we could be a country not at war. How we'd be a country not facing economic turmoil.

I say this not to bash Republicans or incite party wars, but to incite voter enthusiasm. Please, PLEASE, vote. Make your voice heard. And if, God forbid, we again see a situation where maybe your vote, or the vote of one of your fellows in this country is NOT being heard, FIGHT. But let's hope it doesn't come to that. Let's hope we can keep it at the easiest, the most basic level of your responsibility to this country.

Please vote.